I can have something sent in, do you eat the same things as us? There's a lot happening and I'm watching most of it, is there a specific thing you're looking out for -

:So far it seems I can eat your food without difficulty. I am curious mainly whether people seem to be more or less agitated, and whether there are speculations about me. If nothing is urgent, though, we can discuss later – your father is still ravenous for my languages: He returns his attention to quickly check what Fëanáro is thinking. 

Word's gotten around that you say you're from another world, and also that you're confused and from the Outer Lands, and that you went to talk to the King about things. I don't know what Nolofinwë thinks, which will be the most important thing. I think people are mostly less agitated - we asked ours to get off the streets and go read some new research about the Outer Lands -

:That is a clever story. I was - not sufficiently discreet on my arrival, given what I know now. Hopefully this will cover for it: He's not sure what else he ought to have done, if he'd pretended to be a Maia then he wouldn't have gotten the helpful orientation and might not have found out about the succession dispute at all. 

I can't imagine there's any way to land in another universe with a hostile foreign god you don't know anything about and guess right off your safest cover story. We might be able to swing this - not with Nolofinwë, I think, but with the public at least...

"I ate your hat, I ate your hat because I am your hat, I am your hat because I ate your hat? Grammatical?"

:That would be a relief: "Yes," he says out loud to Fëanáro. "Make sense, no." He's been slowly picking up more Quenya vocabulary as well. :You are very quick with languages: 

"Not with only languages," he says. "Or do I say, not only with languages? In Quendi there is a general quickness to people. Quick at languages, probably quick at math, probably quick at magic."

"'Not only with languages'. My people share that trait." He'll answer out loud in Rethwellani as well, Fëanáro clearly has the vocabulary down. "I am quicker than most humans." Modesty has never been one of Leareth's personality traits. "I suspect the average Quendi is quicker than the average human, just as your eyesight is better, and so your extremes would seem - very impressive, from where I stand." 

It's very irritating, if there were any chance of it working he'd consider trying to switch to a Quendi body, but he'd need to convince one of them to have children with them - if that were even possible, biologically speaking - and then wait a very long time, and that's assuming his–

–bastard gods, he thinks to himself, he should have thought of this a day ago. He has no guarantee that his immortality will work at all here, and he needs to check that as soon as possible, and be about six times more cautious in the meantime, damn it not so long ago he was being blasé about Fëanáro considering stabbing him. Not that it'd be likely to get through his personal shields, but he can't guarantee that, it could be a magical sword. 

"The average Quendi is older than the average human, maybe a Quendi of thirty would not seem very quick to humans. Or maybe they would, already they would see better. Or do I say 'they would still see better'. I am not an average Quendi anyway, I am the quickest Quendi."

Leareth refocuses; that can be dealt with later, not right this moment, at the very least he doubts Fëanáro will let anyone get away with killing him before he's extracted every single language fact. "I think that 'already' is the word you want, although for humans eyesight arrives early – in fact, children see and hear better than adults, usually, our bodies deteriorate with age. Yours do not?"

Clearly Fëanáro has no particular leaning toward humility either. What's he thinking right now?

He's thinking about other sentences to tease out the distinction between 'already' and 'still'. "I still went to the store today, I already went to the store today, both are good? But if I say, a Quendi of thirty would already seem quick, I shouldn't say, the Quendi would still seem quick."

Fëanáro is really a very...focused...sort of person. 'One-track' would be the unflattering way to put it, despite his Quendi ability to have multiple threads of conversation. 

"Already is, you were expecting something in the future and it came sooner? 'Still' means something was true in the past and you might expect it no longer to hold but it does. Quick - we might say clever, also - is something that would increase with age, usually, whereas, hmm, you might say: a human of thirty is already adult-sized, a Quendi of thirty is still this high." He gestures at around the height that Fëanáro supposedly was when he ran away. 

"Ah hah." Someone brings an elaborate spread of food and hands it to Nelyafinwë, who passes it on to them. Fëanáro wants the names of everything on it.

Some of the dishes are unrecognizable to him and thus don't have names in Rethwellani, but Leareth can label bread and cheese and some familiar-looking fruits and vegetables, and give the generic word for 'pastry' for the things that look like that. It's really remarkably similar to the food he knows, when you think about this; he mentions this as well. 

He nods. He frowns. 

How did you get here?

The important question is 'did you get here by some process no one else in the history of your world would plausibly have stumbled on', but that's a leading question so he is going for the more neutral one. 

Leareth switches to private Mindspeech. :We have a magic we call Gates - it allows opening a door from one place directly to another, even if they lie thousands of miles apart. Gates themselves are common enough; I was trying a very unusual experiment, a way to make a Gate undetectable. I expected to arrive in a cave where I store some rare books, and instead I stumbled into sombody's squash garden: He's not going to give any more detail in a place where a god might overhear. Just in case, someday, it matters. 

So here's my biggest reservation at this point. There's a Quendi math concept, your world might have it too since your math is the same - there's never two of something.

:We do not have the saying, but - if you mean that two is an un-parsimonious number, compared to 'one' or 'countless' - I have been musing on it also. Perhaps there are countless worlds, and accidental journeys between them are absurdly rare, such that they happen once or twice in the history of a world – or perhaps they happen more often and usually end in the visitor's death in some quiet patch of wilderness: 

- how would that happen? The death in the wilderness part, interworld transportation being exceptionally rare seems plausible.

He still keeps forgetting about the 'paradise' part. :In my world? Cold weather and lack of drinkable water, most likely, perhaps wild animals, starvation if they survived the first two, or poisoning from a non-edible plant eaten in desperation. A human lost in a wilderness they are unfamiliar with is unlikely to survive unless they are very clever and resourceful – having mage-gift would help, but not remove the danger entirely, even a mage needs to sleep and your world contains no ambient energy that I can draw on. I imagine this is not the case here, but might still be in your Outer Lands?: 

Well, we started in the Outer Lands and we managed all right but maybe these days it's that deadly, with the monsters Melkor made still running about. In Valinor all the plants are safe to eat and there are enough Maiar you can usually find one by wandering through a forest shouting for a day or so. There are some wild animals but they're mostly more afraid of us than we are of them. 

:I assume that your people also started as a group, not all separated and alone? If you were to abandon a group of ten humans in the same wilderness, their chances would be far better – even two would be more likely to survive, since they might trade off on sleeping and watching for danger, and more hands and eyes mean more opportunities to find firewood and water in time: 

They started in pairs, husband and wife, and in clusters of six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight, for a hundred and forty-four in total.

:...That is bizarrely specific. Do you have any idea why?: Leareth frowns. :My people have no cultural memory of arising in such a way. I doubt that we were created by the gods at all, as I assume the Quendi would have to have been for it to occur in such a way; in my world, animals change over many generations and sometimes entire new species result, and the world is very old. Though some races on my world were god-created, more recently, so it is possible this happened in our prehistory: